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New Generation of 49ers Success

SAN FRANCISCO — Last weekend at Candlestick Park, it felt the way it used to feel when “Montana” and “Young” and “Rice” were stitched onto jerseys, when the 49ers boasted a franchise as successful as any in sports.

To Coach Jim Harbaugh, it felt like a fortress, as “good as it can get.” To Ted Robinson, the team’s radio announcer, it felt like a renaissance as he nearly lost his voice. To the former running back Roger Craig, it felt like the glory days, when the 49ers won five Super Bowls in 14 seasons, when he never played on a losing team.

“Candlestick was shaking,” Craig said. “Martians on Mars could have heard us screaming.”

As Jed York, the team president, left the stadium, his first phone call was to his uncle, Eddie DeBartolo Jr., a cellular link between present and past. DeBartolo’s ownership tenure, from 1977 to 2000, produced the 49ers’ juggernaut. He later, when ensnarled in the corruption case that sent the former Louisiana governor Edwin W. Edwards to prison, ceded control of the team to his sister, Denise DeBartolo York.

Her son, Jed, wanted Uncle Eddie to return to Candlestick on Sunday and serve as an honorary captain when the 49ers host the Giants in the N.F.C. championship game. DeBartolo accepted.

“It will be the most emotional moment I’ve spent with the 49ers,” he predicted last week.

DeBartolo arrived here from Youngstown, Ohio, and, with his three-piece suits and outsider status, bombed at his initial news conference. His decision to hire Joe Thomas as the general manager proved equally disastrous.

In 1979, a friend and local radio announcer introduced DeBartolo to Bill Walsh, the coach who would change the way the N.F.L. played offense. Their interview, DeBartolo said, lasted all of 15 minutes. He made the hire on the spot.

Walsh held back nothing the first time he addressed the team. “I know what you’re all thinking,” he said, according to Randy Cross, an offensive lineman for 13 seasons in San Francisco. “You’re thinking, ‘I’ve been here for a while. I’ve survived three, four, five coaches. I’ll survive this one.’ Look around, gentlemen. You’re the worst team in the league. If you can’t play here, where are you going to play?”

DeBartolo, in what became the hallmark of his leadership style, empowered the chosen few that comprised his inner circle. He allowed Walsh, on a hunch, to draft a skinny quarterback from Notre Dame named Joe Montana in the third round in 1979. He hired John McVay as the general manager. He brought in Carmen Policy, an old friend from Youngstown, as an executive.

In Walsh’s first season, the 49ers won two games. In 1980, they won six, including a victory against New Orleans that was the largest comeback at the time. The next year, when Montana and Dwight Clark connected for “the Catch” and the 49ers later won the Super Bowl, changed everything.

A dynasty was born, even if it did not seem that way in 1982, when San Francisco finished with a losing record and Walsh needed to be talked out of quitting by DeBartolo that off-season. The 49ers then won at least 10 games a season for the next 16 years.

Photo

Jed York, left, now the president of the 49ers, talking to Coach Bill Walsh and his uncle, Eddie DeBartolo.Credit
San Francisco 49ers

The city of San Francisco needed a football team like that, after the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and the politician and gay rights activist Harvey Milk, and after the Jonestown massacre. DeBartolo gave it to them. In the days before the salary cap, he provided Walsh with an embarrassment of talent, including, at one point, three All-Pro nose guards. He flew the team on a private plane and gave players’ wives necklaces after Super Bowl triumphs.

When the 49ers crushed Dan Marino and the Miami Dolphins in the Super Bowl after the 1984 season, Robinson sensed the dynamic shifting. More locals wore 49ers gear. Tickets seemed impossible to obtain. The 49ers became the dominant presence in Northern California sports, and, Robinson said, “second place wasn’t even close.”

Those teams were so good, for so long, the Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young said on an ESPN conference call last week, he could not remember how many championship games he played in.

Cross said: “With good teams, you could put them in jock straps, without shoes, on broken glass, and they’re going to win. That’s how we felt for the better part of a decade.”

Looking back, DeBartolo said he failed to appreciate the history involved. The expectations reached almost impossible levels, and this levied tolls physical and emotional. When Craig arrived in 1983, the first thing a teammate said to him was “we drafted you to win a Super Bowl.”

Such expectation, Policy said, “meant everyone was under a great deal of pressure to deliver, and deliver didn’t mean the playoffs, deliver meant get to the Super Bowl and win it.”

That pressure, much of it self-inflicted, paled in comparison with what came next. DeBartolo removed himself from day-to-day operations in 1997 to handle his legal problems. He testified against Edwards and pleaded guilty to having knowledge of extortion and fraudulent conduct and failing to report it.

The N.F.L. suspended DeBartolo for the 1999 season and fined him $1 million. At that time, Policy said: “You lived under a requirement to succeed, and then, all of a sudden, everything was falling apart. There was no structure. There was no organizational direction, no authority, and at the same time, a distance was developing between me and the guy I always thought of as my brother.”

DeBartolo says that misconceptions linger from that time period: that he was forced to sell the 49ers to his sister, that he was barred from the N.F.L. He did acknowledge tension with his sister when they divided the family assets, left by their father, who died in 1994, swapping control of the 49ers for real estate holdings. To give up the team that Cross said “meant everything to him” stung, even if, as DeBartolo insisted last week, everything ultimately worked out.

“It’s almost like getting a divorce,” DeBartolo said. “It gets tough. But Denise is my sister. I love her and her family very much.”

Over time, the tension eased. When the 49ers honored safety Ronnie Lott in 2003, DeBartolo returned to Candlestick, at his sister’s invitation. When the team created a Hall of Fame in 2009, it named it after Edward DeBartolo Sr., and made Eddie an inductee.

For all the good family vibrations, though, the franchise entered a dark decade, hampered by poor decisions and salary-cap restraints. No one, Robinson said, “could have imagined the 49ers would fall that far, tear everything down and rebuild from zero.”

By the time quarterback Trent Dilfer, who grew up in the area, arrived in 2006, he saw an organization that lacked the vision that once defined it, mired in dysfunction. As an elder statesman, he preached to younger players that what seemed “so dark would get better.”

Cross said: “It killed me to see them not be very good and draft that high and people think that little of them. The fans had been spoiled by all the Super Bowls. Then, it’s like, O.K., here’s the other side of the karma machine.”

At the news conference to announce the firing of Coach Mike Nolan during the 2008 season, Jed York made perhaps his first appearance as the public face of the team his family owned. He was 27, fresh off a career as a financial analyst at Guggenheim Partners in New York. Craig, who “loves” York but refers to him as “the kid,” said his own children once played with York in the locker room.

York has tried to rebuild the franchise the same way his uncle originally constructed it. He made Trent Baalke the general manager last January, hired Harbaugh the same month and empowered both. Dilfer, who played under Mike Holmgren and Brian Billick, described Baalke as “the best football mind I’ve ever been around,” an astute evaluator of not only talent but how to configure disparate personalities.

The more the 49ers won this season, the more it echoed 1981, from the previous season’s record (6-10) to the young owners in charge of operations to the coach plucked from Stanford to rebuild. This team and the 1981 version each finished with 13-3 records.

“Jed taking over the team has facilitated this,” Policy said. “I’m not sure what would have happened if he didn’t. Eddie feels a sense of warmth and comfort with Jed. That’s really led to this very healthy family situation.”

Soon, the 49ers will build a new stadium, likely in nearby Santa Clara, away from Candlestick, which Cross said was held together “by paint, love and tradition.” Meanwhile, new tradition is also under construction.

Dilfer pointed to the 49ers and the Green Bay Packers as the two teams most likely to achieve sustained success over the next decade. Policy suggested this season could ultimately be remembered as “the resurgence of the 49ers’ dynasty.” Craig predicted “some championship rings in the next 5 to 10 years.”

York, as he moves toward the future with an eye on the past, embraced Harbaugh’s repeated mantra of 49ers history: who’s got it better than us? York noted the pictures Harbaugh splashed all over the team’s facility, from the glory days and from this season.

“The players feel like they’re part of the tradition,” York said on a conference call. “It’s not Joe Montana. It’s not Steve Young. It’s not Jerry Rice. And that’s O.K.”

As the 49ers get ready for the Giants, as DeBartolo waits to hear from the Pro Football Hall of Fame, which recently named him a finalist, one such picture hung in the team facility. There are DeBartolo, Walsh and a young York before a game, staring into the stands, three links in the 49ers’ storied history, its present at once a break from the past and a reminder of it.

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on January 22, 2012, on page SP3 of the New York edition with the headline: New Generation Of 49ers Success. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe